Equipment List for Travel Photography

Travel photography tests a photographer's ability to plan and manage their time and equipment, particularly when air travel is involved. Here's a travel equipment list to help you with your planning.

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Introduction

Packing for a photo/destination trip can be a real challenge, particularly if air travel is part of the itinerary. Depending on your travel plans, you may be severely limited in what gear you can carry with you. For instance, my wife and I once traveled from New Jersey to Arizona to photograph Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon. This trip involved not only air travel, but hiring pack mules to carry our backpacks, but our hiking 10 miles through the desert carrying daypacks with all our camera gear. We then needed to fly out of the canyon via helicopter. As you might imagine, careful planning was involved!

This article will provide you with some guidelines for developing an equipment list for travel photography. It groups items into one of several categories (vital, important, nice to have, bad weather gear, travel gear).

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Vital Equipment

Main camera and backup camera (I prefer multiple DSLRs, but sometimes my wife and I share a DSLR and point and shoot) depending on your budget, the backup camera may fall into a different category

Wide angle zoom (depending on your camera something like a 24-70 or 24-105 is good)

good quality tripod (the better the tripod you can bring, the better off you'll be)

Travel gear (choose one as appropriate for your style of travel)

*Please note - the author received 'M-Rock Great Smokey Mountains Messenger bag and modular trolley' from a company other than Bright Hub in order to develop the content contained within this article or review.